How to Stop Touching Your Face Using Atomic Habits James Clear
New York Times bestselling author James Clear is joining us on The Upgrade this week to help us form important new habits during this panic time, from our daily grounding rituals to finally giving up the habits that make us insecure during a pandemic. James is the author of Atomic Habits: The Simple and Proven Way to Develop Good Habits and Kick Bad Habits away in 2018 .
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Highlights from this week’s series
From an interview with James Clear
On the value of maintaining and shaping habits during this pandemic:
When life is uncertain, your habits can ground you. When you’re unsure of what the future holds or what the next day will bring, you can go back to basics. And I really think that in many ways, when we feel like the world is out of control, we need to go back to what we can control. And you can control your habits … It gives you a sense of control over your life versus the sense of ownership that you may have felt as if it all took a little away from you, whether it was something that you were asked to do to help the communication. social distancing, shelter in place, etc. They can boost psychological well-being or take care of themselves a little.
On how to stop the unconscious automatic habit of touching our face:
It’s actually less productive to say, “Oh, just don’t do this” or “You need to stop wanting this.” This is just a natural reaction. So one of the places where you can step in is to increase the difficulty of the problem. So, you know, you could imagine, to just give as an extreme example, if you were like one of the likes of dog collars … you know dogs have a little cone after surgery? It would be very difficult to touch your face. And the fact that you made the task more difficult will make it less likely that you will … Another way to intervene is to make it obvious … If you make it more obvious that you are touching your face, then perhaps you are remember not to do this. So just wearing some of them, like surgical gloves, is a good example, because if you have gloves, you understand, “Oh, I’m doing this for some reason, maybe I’ll keep my hands off.” But even if you thoughtlessly touch your face, you will understand this, because the sensation is different from the sensation of the hand. And therefore, one of the potential opportunities for this could be wearing gloves.
Watch the entire episode to hear even more about James’ decisions to develop or quit some important habits during this unprecedented time.
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